Gundam 00 In Depth: Ali-Al Saachez

I think I would be inconsiderate to reply to Velocity7’s answers to my “interview” questions without explaining who this guy, Ali-Al Saachez, is.

Antagonist, And Proud Of It

Imagine, for an instant, a war otaku who’s good at the real thing. A connoisseur of death, destruction, war, conflict, and violence in all their forms. A man who seeks battle purely because he enjoys it. A man who is a shameless mercenary, not because he wants the money, but because it’s a legal way to get to kill people. A man who founded a terrorist group using child soldiers to resist the invasion of his homeland in the name of God, blaspheming that name to justify every atrocity, every murder of innocents – and who enjoyed killing so much, he adopted it as his new lifestyle.

Back in his terrorist days, his child soldiers were required to murder their own families to prove their devotion to God (or more accurately, to Saachez). One of these child killers left the nest and became the main character of Gundam 00, adopting the alias of Setsuna F. Seiei and acting to bring about an end to war. Seeing no fun in that, and truly enjoying the idea of toying with his former student (and more importantly, getting the best of his Gundam, a dedicated close combat weapon that seems to exist to goad Saachez, a close combat specialist), Saachez spends much of the show fighting Setsuna and Celestial Being, both on a tactical level (combat) and a strategic level (fostering war and conflict).

In short, Ali-Al Saachez comes off as the living embodiment of everything the protagonists are trying to stop in the world.

Due to the risk of the rest being spoilers in some way – the above wasn’t, it’s background that the show freely offers – I’ll put the rest in spoiler space.

Stopping him is not really in the cards, though. Not only is Saachez a happy killer, he is very, very good at it, and a crack shot, pilot, and as mentioned above, close combat specialist. He actually jumps from faction to faction, surviving their destruction to rise again to haunt the protagonists. One ends up crossing him the wrong way and, after a brief sojourn to murder a journalist in cold blood who got too close to the truth about certain things, killed his former employer, killing and murdering as he obtained weapons with which to fight the protagonists in mobile suit combat. Having failed to destroy them, he then joined back with regular forces to take part in the hunt for Celestial Being, the protagonists’ organization.

Ali-Al’s infamy rose to the point where he actually killed one of the protagonists of the series, only for this character to be replaced by his twin brother, using the same codename of Lockon Stratos. (Side note: Original Lockon was easily the best of the original four pilots IMHO.) Ali-Al’s terrorists had killed the man’s entire family years before, aside from the twin brother. Ali-Al tried hard to finish the family extermination in Season 2, the new Lockon Stratos finally avenged his twin and his family upon Ali-Al, killing the hardcore killer in personal combat (with a gun).

While Ali-Al Saachez also returned to his home nation to crush it under his heel in a military coup, this hardly seems worth focusing on. It’s not like it wouldn’t have happened without him.

For this campaign, he was assigned the Arche Gundam.

So, if you went through everything in the spoiler space, you can see that Ali-Al Saachez was a very busy man, a real fountain of inspiration for psychopaths everywhere.

Small wonder Velocity7 finds Saachez to be one of his favorite antagonists. I mean, if you’re going to be a murderous psychopath, have some pride in it, you know?

Saachez cannot be accused of lacking pride in his work. Or put another way,

If you enjoy what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. – The Punisher

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